C.S. Lewis produced a body of work that ranged from a much-admired treatise on sixteenth century literature, to novels, to a historical essay on love. He was also a kind of theological popularizer who began as an atheist and gravitated to the Church of England. His Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters were designed to bolster the faith of ordinary people after the Second World War, when the C of E was aseptic, dull, and losing members fast. But his most popular and successful work was a series of books for children that included The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Lewis lived the secure and sheltered life of a bachelor don at Oxford, incidentally coping with a large correspondence from those who had been provoked or, more often, inspired by his books. He had an efficient manner with male fans who wrote him critical letters. They would receive a standard brief reply: "Dear Sir, There may be something in what you say. Yours sincerely, C.S. Lewis." Women, on the other hand, might well be drawn into a demure and teasing flirtation-by-mail that ensured a good distance between writer and adoring fan. This did not always prevent the adoration from getting out of hand. One of Lewis' postal admirers lost her sense of proportion and had the banns read in Oxford for her marriage with him.
Another of Lewis' female readers, and American, did succeed in penetrating his coy defenses. She was Joy Davidman, a New York Jewish intellectual and former communist who had been converted to Christianity by reading Lewis' books. Her fascination with this far-away British academic helped to break up her marriage to the American writer William Lindsay Gresham and, in time, drew her to Britain, where she thrust herself into a platonic affair with Lewis, eventually moving into his house.
Not long afterwards, she was found to have terminal cancer. Her former husband wrote to her in the hospital, stating cruelly that when she died he would take their two boys back to American - a prospect that made her deeply unhappy. To prevent this, Lewis married the dying woman and obtained guardianship of the boys. After she died, Lewis wrote a memorial to their relationship, A Grief Observed.
Shadowlands is a dramatization of the platonic affair between Lewis and Davidman. Oddly enough, the theater program does not mention A Grief Observed, though it does take note of Lewis' other work. Shadowlands began life as a television drama whose ending - Joy Davidman screaming in agony as the cancer killer her - was apparently a bit of melodramatic license. The stage play has dropped this, but has taken a number of other liberties, most obviously in the portrayal of Lewis himself. This man, who in real life was by all accounts sophisticated and remarkably subtle in his popularizing approach to religion, is from the opening scene until the end made into a rather dull capon whose approach to religion is crude - not to say simplistically vulgar.
The first scene has Lewis delivering a jocose and patronizing lecture on the contradiction between God's love and the pain which human beings suffer in this world. "When we say 'God loves us' I don't think we mean that God is in love with us, not sitting by the telephone, not writing us letters: ‘I love you madly, God, XXX and hugs.' At last I don't think so." Our suffering, he adds, is a way of making us aware of others: "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." The reason why this must be
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